As a community, we rely on a well-functioning peer-review system. Ideally, the authors should be receiving high-quality peer reviews on time, these reviews should be constructive, and support the acceptance and rejection decision-making process. At the same time, the reviewing workload should be distributed fairly. In recent years, the number of paper submissions to major robotics conferences has grown rapidly and we argue that we need to question whether the current system is indeed well-functioning and sustainable more than ever.
Workshop Goals. This workshop aims to 1) open up a discussion about our peer-review process and identify the most critical weaknesses, 2) come up with feasible and effective ideas to improve it, 3) collect and consolidate reviewer, associate editor, and editor guidelines, and 4) design follow-up monitoring, communication and training activities for a continuous assessment and improvement of the reviewing process.
